#Not like other girls

[republic-of-cheese]

I'm not like other girls. I've somehow angered the Gods.

[etherealspacejelly]

its so funny looking back on my 'not like other girls' phase now as an adult, knowing im audhd, aroace, and transmasc

like. honey. you dont like makeup because of sensory issues. you dont like dresses because of dysphoria. you dont care about boys because you're not attracted to them in that way. of Course you dont fit in with the other girls, a) you're not a girl and b) you're autistic as fuck dumbass

[pyunyrage]

[tinstol]

Is she a Pick Me or is she just masculine? Is she a Pick Me or is she just neurodivergent? Is she a Pick Me or is she just queer? Is she a Pick Me or is she just trans and hasn’t realized it yet? Is she a Pick Me or is she just a person with male friends? Is she a Pick Me or is she just not traditionally feminine? Is she a Pick Me or are you just unfairly judging her?

[yapoholics-anonymous]

this collusion does not save the daughter from the mother's fate.

[your-average-teenage-mess]

The fact that so many of us grew up undiagnosed autistic and socially isolated to the point where we couldn't have a normal interaction with our average classmate, were forced into learning philosophical and psychological theory just to understand what the fuck was wrong with us, kept having our interests shamed by the mainstream and our natural form of existence being seen as a turn-off for almost everyone in our fucking lives, kept being told that we were being inappropriate and unacceptable because the rules of society were stupid, had our entire life fall apart because everything was harder than it was supposed to be, developed multiple mental health issues in the process and had to cling to the insights we gained about society from the outside and to the things we were passionate about as our only forms of stability and power, only to then be told that we're "not better than everyone else for liking different things" and "should stop trying to win over male approval", just because we also happened to live through all that as girls and God Forbid we let the self-importance of an isolated dysfunctional teenage girl without social support blow out of proportion, will probably continue making me angry for as long as this doesn't stop. And maybe a bit after that too.

What I need some of you to understand is that "haha other girls wear makeup and date guys while I listen to indie rock and have no love life" is not necessarily a takedown of wearing makeup and dating guys. Sometimes it's just attempting to joke around at how terrifyingly isolating it is to be the only one who is the latter and WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO MAKE YOURSELF ANY OTHER WAY EVEN IF YOU TRIED, while everyone in your life is the former, and seem to relegate you to the category of "unsociable weirdo". Do you really think that this causes people (and by people I mean TEENAGE GIRLS for fucks sake) to believe they're genuinely better than everyone around them? Do you think people who went through this and made "other girls vs me" memes on Facebook were the ones who left the "other girls" of the world with unresolved personal trauma from highschool? That the outcasts joking about being edgy and cool because they can't get along with anyone are the ones who made gender-conforming girls with mainstream interests and a friend group and a love life feel like they are lesser? Give me. A fucking. Break.

[iddybittysnail]

[hadesoftheladies]

i don't think it's a coincidence that heroines and female protagonists in most entertainment franchises are depicted as extremely beautiful and a good chunk of their power is expressed primarily through their sexual prowess. it makes women correlate attractiveness and femininity with power without actually showing them what having and getting real power looks like. this "women can do both" femme-fatale shit distracts audiences from the fact that femininity actively disempowers women. it drains their finances, keeps them focused on appealing to men instead of overthrowing them (priming them to seek men's approval above their own well-being), and harms their bodies.

i promise you women being sexually attractive to men never helped get them rights or respect. not even an iota.

(also, i've noticed that these super smart, charismatic, beautiful women are always portrayed as exceptional while the women around them are flighty, crazy, stupid, helpless, dumb, hysterical and she's the one to help and liberate them from their bad looks, empty heads, and cowardice. because the narrative must show that she is an EXCEPTION and not the norm because most women really are "like that." they are an unachievable standard that is simultaneously used to bash women while pretending to lift them up. also, there's a lot of white supremacist rhetoric)

[chrissy-kaos]

Little b-slide clip out here for ya'll.. this one actually felt pretty good 🤙🏼🛹

[valewritessss]

Biana Vacker is what the Aphrodite cabin should’ve been

[miasmultifandomdump]

It annoys me how so much of modern discourse around female characters is, to be frank, misogyny repackaged as being progressive.

If a woman's strengths and interests are associated with being feminine, such as cooking or enjoying nice clothes or being kind and compassionate, the entire fandom jumps on her as stereotypical or weak. It's seen as cool to bash on "women's work", never mind that your average misogynist has been doing it for decades, hell, centuries, and the jobs that are mocked as women's work are actually pretty essential to humans surviving and thriving.

And then, of course, if a woman shows the slightest hint of nonconformity, the entire fandom jumps on her because "oh!! she's trying to be not like other girls!! she wants male attention so bad!!" It doesn't matter how she is to the other girls in her life, if she wears combat boots and listens to punk instead of Taylor Swift, she clearly hates every other woman ever according to certain parts of fandom. It couldn't be that she's neurodivergent or LGBT or hell, even just a tomboy, she has to hate every other girl on the planet. /sarcasm

AND JUST TO CLARIFY. These tropes can genuinely be negatively done. The traditionally feminine girl can be a weak character and the tomboy girl can be an ass. But when you're calling a girl a "pick me" just because she doesn't live up to your idea of what a woman should look like or what you think feminism is... congratulations. You've simply repackaged sexism and called it woke. And lots of girls who see this crap online are going to suffer for it but hey, it was never actually about them, so who cares, right? /sarcasm

Anyway, to all the girls reading this post, you go ahead and be who you want. Be a princess or a president or a pop singer or a punk rocker or hell, all of the above. You're not a "pick me" you're not a "handmaiden" you're not trying too hard to be "not like other girls". You are fine. Don't let pseudo-woke nonsense get to you. It's just white noise.

[lepusrufus]

The average human has a lifespan of about 80 years and this is what I choose to do with my precious time

[arashikohedervary]

I'm not your average LotR fan who watches the movies every weekend, speaks Elvish, have read the Silmarillion multiple times and knows Lord Elrond's family tree by heart.

Because I speak Dwarvish.

[shewhotellsstories]

I always thought the critique of the "not like other girls" trope was that it demonizes femininity and creates MCs who hate other girls because there can only be one special girl in the story. But, we shouldn't forget that historically women and girls who didn't conform to gender roles and expectations were treated pretty harshly. And I'm biased, but I'm not sure that the girl who happily called her best friend the other cleverest girl in the Ton is in the same boat as the kind of woman who'd say that they don't have any female friends because girls are too much drama.

[susandsnell]

Re anachronistic feminist characters, you are absolutely right and you should say it.

Maybe people who want to read "write women who sew" type stuff should just go do that instead of trying to make every single female character fit into their worldview. Because I don't want every character to be Eloise, I'm fine with variety, but a lot of people seem like they can't stand even one woman challenging gender norms.

No amount of faux progressive language will change the fact they sound like highschool bullies picking on girls who are too GNC or too "weird."

Thank you so much! Ideally, you'd have feminist characters more representative of the feminist or proto-feminist views of their era where the work is going for historical accuracy to honour the different points of where we were in history and also acknowledge the flaws of the movement at different points in time (1994's Little Women versus the hilariously bad 2019 version comes to mind), and certainly there's an element of repetitiveness in this character type, but this is seldom if ever the criticism I see. The truth of the matter is that in fact many early feminists did denigrate work designated as feminine, but we can acknowledge this as misdirected anger at having one option deemed valid.

Instead, we've somehow arrived at "wanting to be treated with human dignity is internalized misogyny because it really cramps my ability to romanticize the past". As you say, nothing wrong with valuing the labour more frequently done by women, but the fact of the matter is you can do that and show that there were always many people who resisted or did not fit into the tight boxes that society forced them into. Instead of, you know, ridiculing them for wanting to break the boxes while enjoying the fruits of having to fit into fewer boxes than our predecessors precisely because of women who loudmouthed and fought back and didn't fit into certain people's fantasy of being a submissive little princess. The kind of girls you made fun of and ostracized in high school, one might say.

To address a particular point you raise that I think is the most important in this entire ongoing discussion:

No amount of faux progressive language will change the fact they sound like highschool bullies picking on girls who are too GNC or too "weird."

I keep saying it, but a certain type of liberal feminist are now using "NLOG" the way it was socially acceptable 10-15 years ago to call someone a lesbian/homophobic or transphobic slurs because they didn't wear makeup or want a boyfriend. It is absolutely high school bullying mentality and has gone from an imperfect attempt at addressing internalized misogyny to active misogyny and latent/often overt homophobia and transphobia.

This is what the numbskulls making video essay after video essay about the apparent 'NLOG crisis' fail to grasp. The Heathers and the Plastics are not 'demonized for being feminine', they are accurate representations of how under patriarchy, social capital is gained through strict, obsessive adherence to white, Western beauty standards (which corporations can profit off of endlessly by manufacturing infinite insecurities, so bonus to the rich girls) and excelling at heterosexuality and pleasing others, and this system self-reinforces by the 'winners' bullying those who do not conform as easily. Jo March, queercoded dynamo that she was, took nothing away from the sisters who were happier with more traditional lifestyles because she wanted better for herself and the girls of the future, and represents so many women who fought for just that. You're not actually an intellectual for thinking Daphne Bridgerton has more value than Eloise because she was designated the season's Diamond, a literal in-universe (and true to life) Prize For Being Correctly Female, and unquestioningly accepts being paraded around like an ornament and smiling at being auctioned off to the highest bidder while Eloise fought back, criticized, and wanted an education more than any boy until they forced heterosexuality upon her. You are in fact a vanguard of the very patriarchal system the franchise even presents as backwards, because you don't want anyone raining on your arranged marriage fantasies.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing feminist, about snarking girls who do not like or for whatever reason, cannot or will not perform conventional femininity.

There is a certain sour-grapes defensiveness that comes from beig ostracized and punished for Failing At Your Gender if you weren't good at what was expected of you/resisted it. Femininity is derided, but it is also imposed (the two work in tandem to oppress women); and if you fail at its imposition, it's natural to try and gain protection by participating in the derision. Hell, I theorize that people who proclaimed themselves "not like other girls" in the contemporary age often did so out of resistance at the fact that we're supposed to perform (cisheteronormative) sexiness from the time we hit our teens, and of course the panopticon self-reinforcement that is how Other Girls treat you if you, an adolescent girl, shirk performance of femininity in any way. Certainly, I've also read much about GNC girls (of various identities) and neurodivergent girls equally having turned to this, which makes sense, as they're frequently targets for such bullying.

I do also think - and have personally experienced - it was an often imperfect articulation of queerness in many cases. The societal ideal of women under a patriarchy is cisheteronormativity; our value is derived from our appeal to men, and from the time we start maturing, sexual availability and appeal to men is the highest virtue. Therefore, women whose sexuality is not limited to men - or heaven forbid, doesn't include them at all - 'fail' gender, and accordingly often feel a sense of alienation and ostracism from other girls when they don't get as excited about dating boys. Also, in many cases (anecdotal I admit from people I know, but still significant), people who had a phase of asserting they "weren't like other girls" were in the process of discovering that they weren't girls at all!

And in some cases - again, I've mentioned that I was an Eloise for all the handwringing about how girls of that era wouldn't say that or do that and it would never occur to want more than what they had (...okay, so why are things different now?) - it's a frustration from the outspoken feminists and reformers at not being able to get other girls on board with us, because deviation from expectation will make you the weirdo who gets punished and rejected because ugh, annoying! As one historical costuming youtuber I won't name so charmingly puts it in her godawful video essay, "the women who made a big show of fighting back were freaks." (Way to convince us you care about feminism...)

All this to say the anti-NLOG brigade have utterly worn out my patience, and at best seem ignorant of the battles that have won us the freedoms we have today because it's not fun to consider how your escapist fantasy might be problematic (understandable, you don't always have to reflect on this to be aware), and at worst? They're getting the chance to be the mean girl in high school again/that they never got to be, they're just dressing it up in the bastardized language of feminism.

[hornywomen]

Terfs be like: Consensual bdsm is bad because women's consent doesn't matter. Sex is inherently unfeminist by the way so women shouldnt think they can like it. Taking ownership of your desires oppresses you. Also all men are bad. By giving no positive reinforcement to feminist ally men and men who don't hurt women we are encouraging society to be better. Women need to cover up their body. Because choosing your own comfort level is unfeminist. Being a feminine woman is bad because feminine clothing is oppressive. But if you're trans then you hate women. Then they see no issues with any of these arguments??